it’s a phenomenon that Hua Hsu has noticed since he won the Pulitzer Prize for Memoir or Autobiography in 2023: People tend to take his words more literally.
Hsu, a professor of literature at Bard College in New York, has only had a few classes of students since his celebrated work, Stay True (Doubleday, 2022), was published just two years ago. Some of his pupils haven’t read his book, he says, because they’re waiting until after he’s taught them for a semester.
But some of them are in tune with even the smallest nuances of his work, and that’s been an adjustment in helping them find their own path.
“There was a memory in my book of when I was a college student,” says Hsu. “I had this college professor who I loved, but he was very busy. I went in to talk to him about my senior thesis, and he essentially said, ‘You always come in here just to talk to me. You haven’t written anything. Come back to me when you’ve written something and then we’ll talk.’”
That story is just one small part of his memoir, which deals with the trauma he felt after a close friend was murdered in a carjacking.
Hsu recalled the professor fondly, he says, and didn’t fault him for the admonition. But those were different times, and these are different students.
“On the first day of class last year, a student asked about my office hours,” says Hsu, bringing the anecdote full circle. “I said, ‘They’re listed here. Shoot me an email beforehand.’ Then they said, ‘Can we just come and talk?’ I said, ‘Isn’t that the point of office hours? I don’t have a policy. You just come and we talk.’
“They said, ‘Well, in your book, you wrote about your professor.’ And I said, ‘That was someone else. That was not me. You can come in and talk. I have a candy dish.’ That was one of the only times I thought they had read it too carefully. I had to make sure they knew they could come and talk to me.”
Hsu, a warm and generous conversationalist, will speak at this weekend’s Santa Fe International Literary Festival, and he’s meeting with a group of students from Albuquerque Academy who have been studying his writing.
This visit will be his first time in Santa Fe, he says. The Cal Berkeley grad did a whirlwind book tour after Stay True came out, and he’s been touched by how people have reacted to his story.
“I find that to be astonishing,” he says. “It has less to do with me than with the universality of loss and the search for belonging, friendship, and community. It’s very humbling to have facilitated people thinking about that in their own lives. The book is written from the perspective of a fairly solipsistic teenager-early 20-something. Re-inhabiting that space, I was often a little embarrassed by how navel-gazey I was. Then again, I think most people in their late teens and early 20s, especially as a college student, you’re supposed to feel that way.”
Hsu earned a doctorate in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University in 2008 and published his first book, A Floating Chinaman: Fantasy and Failure Across the Pacific (Harvard University Press), in 2016. He became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2017, and he’s grown accustomed to asking artists — usually musicians — about their creative process.
But now he’s on the other end of the interview.
“I feel comfortable talking about it, but I don’t want whatever I say to crowd out what someone may draw from it themselves,” he says. “It was never really meant to do the things it’s doing in terms of speaking to people. I really just wrote it for myself and, to some extent, for my friends. I never went into it thinking I would have to account for it or talk about it as a process.”
Hsu says he began copiously taking notes about his friend, identified only as Ken in the book, just days after the tragedy that took his life. He poured himself into memorializing the moment and by doing so created a time capsule and a writerly path he could follow later.
He now knows his instinct wasn’t necessarily therapeutic. It didn’t feel good to stay locked inside his brain and dwell on his most painful thoughts and memories. It might’ve been better, he says, if he’d had the emotional tools to talk about the trauma with other people.
“I think it’s sort of a paradox,” he says of the instinct to document his thoughts. “I had an instant record of what I was thinking and feeling and wanting and fearing in the immediate shadow of something terrible happening. At the same time, I think the reason I became so fixated on writing about it was because I had written about it in those early days and hours. I was trying to get back to that feeling I had writing those things down in those early days.”
Stay True became a labor of love that took him 20 years to complete, and when he brought it to his agent and editors, the book was about twice its published length, he says, and in dire need of outside perspective. Some of the editing removed detailed references to places he was going and music he was listening to at the time of the trauma. That made the book less hyper-specific to his story and more relatable to other people.
“I think when I wrote the incredibly long, unedited version, I felt like that was my story. But to turn it into a book, nobody needed to know that much about me,” he says. “I felt like the input from other people was really important, and it is kind of strange to think about it that way. But I don’t understand poetry, and sometimes I’ll interview a poet and say, ‘How does an editor work for poetry? There’s only 30 words on the page. If they disturb three words, that’s 10 percent of your whole poem.’ I think for me, there was a level of trust where it felt like my editors and my agent understood who I was.
“In personal writing, it’s often about creating a character. You’re turning the raw materials of your life into a story, and you have to treat it as such.” ◀
